Relative Something

Walking Asher unleashed through our woods yesterday, I took a picture of him trotting in front of me because he was so calm and happy. I was even happier because he stayed on the trail and was not manic about the sights and smells constantly vying for his attention.

Shortly after I captured that image, his trot picked up pace and soon he was running out of sight ahead of me.

It was nice while it lasted.

No trouble came from any of his brief excursions out of our sight on multiple sessions of walking with him unleashed. Asher generally explores the woods adjacent to our property and returns within roughly one to five minutes of vanishing. Since he has yet to reliably respect our voiced recall commands, our off-leash walks happen more toward the wooded end of our property as opposed to the open fields near the road.

We do not trust he would know enough to stay away from traffic passing on our street. I suspect just the opposite; he would be inclined to dangerously chase after moving vehicles at this point.

On one of our trails, we passed something I don’t recall ever seeing before.

Do you know what critter makes this?:

There was a half-dozen of them in relatively close proximity.

I added my foot to one of them to give a size perspective.

Just ignore that brightly colored leaf stuck in my boot. [I can’t keep my eye from looking at that distraction.]

Cyndie suggested we do an image search after uploading one of my photos. I figured that wouldn’t work but I was very wrong. She quickly found many photos with striking similarities to this one of mine:

Based on the search, the likely creatures are ground bees. Color me surprised.

I’ve seen bees disappear into a hole in the ground but I’ve not seen the ant-like piles of granules with the perfect pencil-sized hole on top like these.

I learned two things from this. One is obviously the discovery of ground bees. The other is to not doubt Cyndie’s problem-solving prowess.

Married for over 41 years and known her since we were teens in high school. You’d think I would have already learned not to doubt her abilities by now.

.

.